ABSTRACT
The last decade of the 20th century saw regional issues rise to prominence, both in society at large and on the agenda of academic analysts. Regions were seen as the emerging tier of governance, gaining prominence either because central government wanted to decentralise public activities and/or in response the pressure of sub-national actors, and discursively highlighted through the coining of the expression ‘Europe of the Regions’ (Marks, 1996; Keating, 1997, 1998; Anderson, 1994). Regions were heralded as a new repository of identification in an age where the traditional position of the nation state was challenged by transnational actors and processes (Paasi, 1996; Keating, 1997; Raagma, 2002). And in a world of increasingly global competition some regions became household names because of their perceived capacity to cope with competitive pressures on the basis of ‘untradeable dependencies’ and ‘tacit knowledge’, and the success of e.g. Silicon Valley, Emilia-Romagna and Baden-Württemberg gave rise to extensive research programmes and a policy industry which tried to emulate these exemplary ‘intelligent regions’ (Veggeland, 1983; Stöhr, 1989; Cooke and Morgan, 1993; Hallin and Malmberg, 1996).
